(22 December 2015) Trade was at the top of the European agenda in 2015, as huge bilateral trade deals between the European Union (EU) and third countries continued to be negotiated and debated. But while agreements such as TTIP – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership whose details are currently being worked over by the Commission and Obama legislation – steal much of the limelight, others seem to take a back seat. One such deal is the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or CETA, which will affect future trade relations between the EU and Canada.
This silence is worrying because although dismissed as being of little relevance due to the modest size of Canada, CETA is for trade union groups and civil society very problematic indeed. A discussion on the EU-Canada trade agreement held in the international trade committee of the European Parliament this month (9 December 2015) – the first of its kind since negotiations on CETA began as far back as 2009 – was thus a welcome, if long overdue, opportunity.
One serious concern on CETA relates to public services. EPSU, like many others, wanted public services to be fully excluded from the deal and are unhappy at the lack of safeguards for health, education, water and sanitation and public transport provision as the deal currently stands. For the first time in an EU agreement, CETA will follow what is known as a ‘negative list’ approach to negotiations, which means that all public services are officially open to procurement unless they have been expressly removed from the negotiating table. This makes it much harder for governments – especially at local level – to protect them from exposure to liberalisation.
Reassurances from European Commissioner for trade Ms Cecilia Malmström fail to assuage these concerns. Her insistence that the EU’s ‘tried and tested’ techniques for safeguarding public services in trade agreements have not seen any major problems in the last 20 years rests on shaky ground, particularly given the current direction of Europe’s political winds. No fewer than 11 EU member states have so far liberalised long-term care. Without an explicit exclusion of these services from CETA it will become extremely difficult for these countries to protect the long-term care sector from the asset-stripping strategies of foreign financial investors.
Even more concerning, instruments contained in CETA, known as ‘ratchet’ and ‘standstill’ clauses, threaten the ability of future governments to bring failing and costly outsourced services back into public ownership, effectively rendering these liberalisation commitments irreversible. In a worrying indication of the negotiators’ intentions, it became clear in this month’s CETA discussion in Parliament that, far from accidental, ratcheting has been deliberately and precisely invented to shorten the path to free trade “Nirvana”.
The notion of irreversibility doesn’t stop there. CETA includes Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a form of private arbitration which allows disputes between foreign corporate providers and governments to be dealt with in private courts that sit outside state judiciary mechanisms, overseen by lawyers selected by the complainant corporation itself. Not only has the existence of ISDS in other bilateral trade agreements enabled several multinational corporations to sue governments for implementing policies that threaten their profits, but many fear that the mere threat of legal action means that more progressive governments will be dissuaded from regulatory intervention and renationalisation policies in the future.
As the deal currently stands, therefore, member states will have had a one-off chance to decide whether or not to commit their public services in CETA, made at the time they negotiated the agreement. Future governments will not be able to undo this, no matter how negative the impact of such decisions on frontline services. We might wonder whether the European Commission, which is bound to uphold the Treaty provisions that safeguard public services, has authority to do this.
Despite all this, the Commission remains adamant that the agreement poses no problems for public services and has indicated that it will be ready to present CETA to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) for approval in 2016.
For EPSU, such swift dismissals of what are very real concerns are simply not enough. As this month’s exchange made clear, there is a palpable disconnect between the many parties waging in on the CETA debate, with a cacophony of dissenting voices against the Commission’s plans from EU citizens and civil society stakeholders. As the date for a European Parliament vote on CETA fast approaches, our questions need urgent answers, and we will keep putting them to CETA’s backers until our fears are allayed. The debate in the international trade committee of the European Parliament was an important chance to do just that, however it is clear that much needs to be done to develop a real dialogue on the extent to which public services are kept in or out of CETA. Failure to do so will set the EU firmly on track towards ever greater, easier and irreversible liberalisation.
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